#278 Is God Able to Do Evil?

Dr. craig’s response

I love serious questions from atheists, David! Your questions are good ones, too.

Yes, I do affirm that God’s being essentially good means that goodness is a property which God could not have lacked. Indeed, on my view God just is the paradigm of goodness in every possible world. This entails that God cannot do evil, since that would be contrary to His very nature.

So the answer to Q1: “Is God able to do evil?”is, No. That implies that Q2, as well as AR1 and AR2, go by the boards.

Now in response to a negative answer to Q1, you express some important concerns. First, “it is not clear how God can be said to be good, as surely an important part of being good is having the ability to do evil but choosing not to.” Here I think you’re confusing moral value with moral duties, David. Freedom of the will is important for moral responsibility, for moral praise and blame, in carrying out one’s moral duties. But God’s being the paradigm of moral value requires only that He have various qualities like kindness, fairness, compassion, and so forth, which serves to determine the content of moral goodness.

Your second concern is more apropos: “If God is not able to do evil, doesn't He become a sort of moral automaton, and not worthy of praise (at least in the moral sense)?” Here the claim is that a being which lacks the freedom to do evil cannot be praised for fulfilling his moral duties. It seems to me that there are a couple of responses to this.

First, you assume that freedom entails the ability to do the opposite of what one does. I’m persuaded that this is not true. Consider the well-known illustration of someone who, unbeknownst to him, has had his brain wired up with remote-controlled electrodes by a mad scientist who is an Obama supporter. When the man enters the voting booth, if he votes for Obama, the mad scientist will do nothing. But if he goes to vote for Romney, the mad scientist activates the electrodes, which trigger him to vote for Obama instead. Now clearly the man has no power in this situation to vote for Romney. But if he goes in and votes for Obama, doesn’t he do so freely? After all, the scientist did nothing in this case! It is just as if the man were not wired with electrodes at all. This thought experiment suggests that what is crucial to freedom of the will is not the ability to do the opposite but the absence of external causal constraints upon one’s choice: it is entirely up to you. In God’s case He is clearly free from such external causal constraints and therefore does the good freely. So He is not at all a moral automaton, but a free agent.

Second, on my favored Divine Command Theory of ethics, moral duties arise as a result of divine imperatives. Our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands. Now since God presumably issues no commands to Himself, He literally has no moral duties to fulfill. If God does not fulfill moral duties, then in what sense is He morally praiseworthy? Here Immanuel Kant's distinction between acting from duty and acting in accordance with duty has proved helpful. God may freely act in ways which for us would be rule-following and so praiseworthy in the sense of our fulfilling our moral duties, so that God can be said similarly to be praiseworthy in an analogical way. This conception helps us to understand the sense in which God is to be praised: not in the sense of commendation for fully executing His duties (since He has none), but rather in the sense of adoration for His moral perfection.

This is not to say with AR3 that “He is still worthy of praise simply because it is part of His essential nature to be worthy of praise.” I agree with you that such a reply would make “the notions of goodness and praiseworthiness rather meaningless as they apply to God.” Rather I have given an account of God’s grounding moral values, His freedom, and His relation to moral duty that explains these notions. As a free agent who exemplifies all these various moral perfections and who freely acts in accordance with duty, God is good in a very recognizable sense.